![]() Television values us as customers for the wares it sells, or as gloating spectators of deaths it is eager to broadcast live. We may grip a remote control but, Thomson warns, “we are not in charge”, because “technology is less our tool than something that makes tools of us”. We can switch the set off, but the medium remains permanently and ubiquitously on distending to cover the sides of skyscrapers in Times Square or shrinking to fit into our smartphones, it has taken over the world. Thomson, however, understands the futility of such gestures. Enraged by the fatuous sales pitches that drivel from a set in his motel room, the hero of Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities hefts his boot into the box, concusses it and gloats over the charred mess. In Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, widowed Jane Wyman is given a TV set by her children: it signals that they expect her to settle on her sofa and sink into meek, housebound obsolescence. After all, the big screen usually treats the small screen with disdain. I mistakenly expected David Thomson, the most imaginative and affectionate writer on cinema, to take a dim view of television. ![]()
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